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Reviewing Zed: An IDE of the Future
Will this hyped, new, modern, fast, and -recently- open-source IDE be the VSCode killer?
Disclaimer
Zed is not a fully-fledged IDE at the time of writing this article, it is still in beta, and this article is an early preview of what it has to offer at this stage. Realistically, at the time, you would likely want to stick with VSCode or whatever IDE you are currently using unless you really value the speed of your editor.
TL;DR
Zed is a new, open-source IDE that’s faster than Sublime Text and provides many powerful features out of the box.
It is currently in beta and can be downloaded only on Mac devices, but support for Windows and Linux is coming.
#0: The Current Issue
VSCode is currently the editor of choice for anyone wanting to start their journey in programming. It is the most popular IDE currently. It is modern, elegant, featureful, and powerful. It is written completely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which makes extending it approachable for most developers, and it already has a huge collection of extensions that can be installed to modify its behavior, change its theme, or add support for countless languages and frameworks.
VSCode is almost perfect, but it has a crucial issue: it is slow.
As mentioned before, VSCode is built completely with web technologies, to achieve that across multiple platforms, VSCode uses Electron.js — a framework for building cross-platform desktop apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Electron is popular and powerful, but it’s known to often be slow, laggy, and memory-consuming -that’s why more performant frameworks like Tauri started to gain popularity recently-.
VSCode’s performance issues have led to the development of new, faster, and more memory-friendly alternatives. One of those competing options that have gained popularity recently is Zed.
#1: The New IDE
Zed, developed by the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter, aims to be the new IDE that will take VSCode’s place as the king of code editors.
The developers of Zed who made Atom were the ones that made Electron.js -previously Atom Shell-, the framework that powers VSCode, and the source of its performance issues (:
It was recently open-sourced, and it provides a set of powerful features out of the box, including:
Incredible Speed
Zed can outperform lightweight editors like Sublime Text as shown in this benchmark, and performs nearly twice as fast as VSCode:
The unique performance of Zed can be attributed to two main reasons:
- Zed is built with Rust, using a new specifically-made framework called GPUI that leverages the power of your GPU, which results in great speed and reliability.
- Another feature that makes Zed so performant is its ability to leverage multiple cores with multithreading. It achieves that by using Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types or CRDTs, you can read more about them from this article I wrote some time ago.
Seamless Collaboration
Another feature where Zed shines at is its powerful collaboration tooling. Zed uses CRDTs to support real-time code collaboration out of the box, as well as an integrated chat interface for an enhanced experience.
Integrated Intelligence
Zed comes with built-in support for GitHub Copilot, as well as an integrated assistant with ChatGPT-3.5 or GPT-4 that enables you to write and refactor large amounts of code in seconds.
In The Box
Some additional cool features of Zed include:
- Language-awareness by maintaining a full syntax tree for every buffer as you type, add to that support for Language Server Protocol (LSP) and you have precise code highlighting, powerful autocompletion, and seamless code navigation, amongst other benefits.
- Full-featured integrated terminal giving you shell access directly from your editor.
- Built-in Vim mode and VSCode style default bindings to speed your coding abilities from the start.
- A variety of light and dark themes to choose from to make the editor feel yours, as well as a promised way of creating and loading custom themes closer to Zed 1.0.
- A CLI tool that can installed directly from the editor for opening files and projects from the terminal.
These are not all the features Zed has to offer, you can check more of them at their website.
Drawbacks
Being in beta, Zed has some issues currently, like:
- Bugs, of course.
- Not completely polished typing experience.
- Currently only downloadable on Mac devices, but support for Windows and Linux is coming.
- No current way of creating or using extensions, but coming in future versions.
- Lack of some features you might be familiar with if you have used VSCode, like built-in source control, debugging and testing panel, and file outline.
A lot of these issues that Zed has now, are usually normal for a beta product, and hopefully, most of them will get fixed even before 1.0.
#2: Pictures
OK, enough talking, let’s look at the actual editor:
#3: Conclusion
Zed is an IDE unique in its performance, features, and power, and even while it is still in beta, it is an impressive tool to work with, and I bet on it getting more features in the future that would make it a strong rival to the widely-used VSCode.
Stackademic
Thank you for reading until the end. Before you go:
